an understanding of the highest principles of things that functions as a guide for living a truly exemplary human life. From the pre- Socratics through Plato this was a unified notion. But Aristotle introduced a distinction between theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronesis), the former being the intellectual virtue that disposed one to grasp the nature of reality in terms of its ultimate causes (metaphysics), the latter being the ultimate practical virtue that disposed one to make sound judgments bearing on the conduct of life. The former invoked a contrast between deep understanding versus wide information, whereas the latter invoked a contrast between sound judgment and mere technical facility. This distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom persisted through the Middle Ages and continues to our own day, as is evident in our use of the term ‘wisdom’ to designate both knowledge of the highest kind and the capacity for sound judgment in matters of conduct. See also ARISTO- TLE , PRACTICAL REASON , THEORETICAL REASO. C.F.D. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951), Austrianborn British philosopher, one of the most original and challenging philosophical writers of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna into an assimilated family of Jewish extraction, he went to England as a student and eventually became a protégé of Russell’s at Cambridge. He returned to Austria at the beginning of World War I, but went back to Cambridge in 1928 and taught there as a fellow and professor. Despite spending much of his professional life in England, Wittgenstein never lost contact with his Austrian background, and his writings combine in a unique way ideas derived from both the Anglo- Saxon and the Continental European tradition. His thought is strongly marked by a deep skepticism about philosophy, but he retained the conviction that there was something important to be rescued from the traditional enterprise. In his Blue Book (1958) he referred to his own work as ‘one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called philosophy.’ What strikes readers first when they look at Wittgenstein’s writings is the peculiar form of their composition. They are generally made up of short individual notes that are most often numbered in sequence and, in the more finished writings, evidently selected and arranged with the greatest care. Those notes range from fairly technical discussions on matters of logic, the mind, meaning, understanding, acting, seeing, mathematics, and knowledge, to aphoristic observations about ethics, culture, art, and the meaning of life. Because of their wide-ranging character, their unusual perspective on things, and their often intriguing style, Wittgenstein’s writings have proved to appeal to both professional philosophers and those interested in philosophy in a more general way. The writings as well as his unusual life and personality have already produced a large body of interpretive literature. But given his uncompromising stand, it is questionable whether his thought will ever be fully integrated into academic philosophy. It is more likely that, like Pascal and Nietzsche, he will remain an uneasy presence in philosophy. From an early date onward Wittgenstein was greatly influenced by the idea that philosophical problems can be resolved by paying attention to the working of language – a thought he may have gained from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–02). Wittgenstein’s affinity to Mauthner is, indeed, evident in all phases of his philosophical development, though it is particularly noticeable in his later thinking.
Until recently it has been common to divide Wittgenstein’s work into two sharply distinct phases, separated by a prolonged period of dormancy. According to this schema the early (‘Tractarian’) period is that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), which Wittgenstein wrote in the trenches of World War I, and the later period that of the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which he composed between 1936 and 1948. But the division of his work into these two periods has proved misleading. First, in spite of obvious changes in his thinking, Wittgenstein remained throughout skeptical toward traditional philosophy and persisted in channeling philosophical questioning in a new direction. Second, the common view fails to account for the fact that even between 1920 and 1928, when Wittgenstein abstained from actual work in philosophy, he read widely in philosophical and semiphilosophical authors, and between 1928 and 1936 he renewed his interest in philosophical work and wrote copiously on philosophical matters. The posthumous publication of texts such as The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar, Philosophical Remarks, and Conversations with the Vienna Circle has led to acknowledgment of a middle period in Wittgenstein’s development, in which he explored a large number of philosophical issues and viewpoints – a period that served as a transition between the early and the late work.
Early period. As the son of a greatly successful industrialist and engineer, Wittgenstein first studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, and traces of that early training are evident throughout his writing. But his interest shifted soon to pure mathematics and the foundations of mathematics, and in pursuing questions about them he became acquainted with Russell and Frege and their work. The two men had a profound and lasting effect on Wittgenstein even when he later came to criticize and reject their ideas. That influence is particularly noticeable in the Tractatus, which can be read as an attempt to reconcile Russell’s atomism with Frege’s apriorism. But the book is at the same time moved by quite different and non-technical concerns. For even before turning to systematic philosophy Wittgenstein had been profoundly moved by Schopenhauer’s thought as it is spelled out in The World as Will and Representation, and while he was serving as a soldier in World War I, he renewed his interest in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, and mystical outlook. The resulting confluence of ideas is evident in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and gives the book its peculiar character. Composed in a dauntingly severe and compressed style, the book attempts to show that traditional philosophy rests entirely on a misunderstanding of ‘the logic of our language.’ Following in Frege’s and Russell’s footsteps, Wittgenstein argued that every meaningful sentence must have a precise logical structure. That structure may, however, be hidden beneath the clothing of the grammatical appearance of the sentence and may therefore require the most detailed analysis in order to be made evident. Such analysis, Wittgenstein was convinced, would establish that every meaningful sentence is either a truth-functional composite of another simpler sentence or an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation of simple names. He argued further that every atomic sentence is a logical picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly the same formal structure as the atomic sentence that depicts it. He employed this ‘picture theory of meaning’ – as it is usually called – to derive conclusions about the nature of the world from his observations about the structure of the atomic sentences. He postulated, in particular, that the world must itself have a precise logical structure, even though we may not be able to determine it completely. He also held that the world consists primarily of facts, corresponding to the true atomic sentences, rather than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are concatenations of simple objects, corresponding to the simple names of which the atomic sentences are composed. Because he derived these metaphysical conclusions from his view of the nature of language, Wittgenstein did not consider it essential to describe what those simple objects, their concatenations, and the facts consisting of them are actually like. As a result, there has been a great deal of uncertainty and disagreement among interpreters about their character. The propositions of the Tractatus are for the most part concerned with spelling out Wittgenstein’s account of the logical structure of language and the world and these parts of the book have understandably been of most interest to philosophers who are primarily concerned with questions of symbolic logic and its applications. But for Wittgenstein himself the most important part of the book consisted of the negative conclusions about philosophy that he reaches at the end of his text: in particular, that all sentences that are not atomic pictures of concatenations of objects or truth-functional composites of such are strictly speaking meaningless. Among these he included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, all propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all propositions of logic, indeed all philosophical propositions, and finally all the propositions of the Tractatus itself. These are all strictly meaningless; they aim at saying something important, but what they try to express in words can only show itself.
As a result Wittgenstein concluded that anyone who understood what the Tractatus was saying would finally discard its propositions as senseless, that she would throw away the ladder after climbing up on it. Someone who reached such a state would have no more temptation to pronounce philosophical propositions. She would see the world rightly and would then also recognize that the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural science; but those could never touch what was really important in human life, the mystical. That would have to be contemplated in silence. For ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,’ as the last proposition of the Tractatus declared.
Middle period. It was only natural that Wittgenstein should not embark on an academic career after he had completed that work. Instead he